Pictured above is the key to the Longfellow family tomb in the Western Cemetery in Portland, Maine. The tomb is where several family members, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s parents Stephen (d. 1849), Zilpah (d. 1851) and brother Samuel (d. 1888) were interred. How the key came into the collections of the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts is unknown, but it does not seem unusual that such a thing would end up in the hands of someone like Alice Longfellow, the poet’s daughter and resident of the Cambridge house until 1928, or Harry Dana, the poet’s grandson who lived here until 1950. The real mystery is what happened to the remains of the Longfellow family members placed in the tomb.
Portland’s Western Cemetery seems to have had a reputation for being a bit of a disorganized place. Established in the eighteenth-century, it became the city’s primary burying ground in 1829, and remained so until 1852. The plan of the property that was laid out in 1840 was destroyed in the great fire of Portland in 1866, as a result no one was even sure how many people had been buried in the cemetery. The cemetery was active until 1910.
City workers opened the tomb in 1986 during a project to replace its locked iron gate and brick up the entrance. When they did so, they discovered that the tomb was completely empty, with no evidence of anyone having tampered with the lock. To this day, no records that shed any light on the whereabouts of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s parents and brother have been uncovered. Unfortunately the cemetery faced intense vandalism in 1988-1989, with an estimate of almost 2,000 tombs having been desecrated in that period. The city initiated a restoration project in 2003.